With the development of electronic and communication technologies, more and more electronic equipments have been applied to daily life. At present, update of hardware is not compatible with update of software, which causes inconvenience to users. In order to solve this problem, there have been provided a reconfigurable device. In such reconfigurable device, however, improvement of the hardware must be supported by software. Hardware supporting reconfigurable devices comprises FPGA or rDPA processor which can be programmed to regulate their functions.
Software refactoring is an effective way to realize various functions of hardware. A common way is putting the developed software on a server so that reconfigurable devices can update their software by downloading the developed software over wired or wireless networks from the server. Because of the widespread use of smart phones, downloading through OTA (Over-The-Air) has become a main way. A working group called Mobile Alliance Open (OMA) is formed by several major institutions in the world to develop technical standards for OTA owing to many benefits of OTA. The standards of OMA DM (Device Management) set by OMA have been adopted by IBM, Microsoft as well as other large manufacturers. According to statistics on recently released movable devices, 80% of the firmware can be reconstructed. DM OMA can be used not only to download and update the software, and correct the bugs in the software, but also for vehicle management, monitoring equipment signal and quality control. In recent years, people have also done a lot of works to improve the performance of DM OMA, such as designing new management agent, etc. However, all these methods are based on the traditional client/server mode which is not fit for the situation in which a large number of devices download and update concurrently.
Domestic patents related to OTA mainly focus on four aspects, namely, the new method of OTA technology, the new method of OTA realization, the application of OTA and the test concerning OTA.
A method of downloading a firmware disclosed in Chinese Patent Publication No. CN101247416, in this patent document, a pretreatment method of downloading a firmware, a method of verifying integrity of a firmware and a method of downloading a firmware were disclosed. However, the methods are still based on the traditional client/server mode.
A terminal with multiple processors and a method of downloading through OTA thereof are disclosed in Chinese Patent Publication No. CN102625288A. The terminal with multiple processors comprises an AP (Application Processor), a CO (Communication Processor) and a UICC (Universal integrated circuit card). The AP acts as a relay station of the UICC and the OTA server. When the UICC sends a request for downloading data to the OTA server, the request is first sent to the AP, and then to the OTA server from the AP. The AP receives a response data which is send by the OTA server in response to the request for downloading data and sends the response data to the UICC for downloading. This invention has improved the speed of downloading by means of data exchange between the OTA server and the UICC via the AP. This technical solution breaks through the traditional client/server mode and improves the efficiency of downloading through OTA. However, these methods of downloading through OTA disclosed in the published patent documents and published research papers are still of downloading software directly or indirectly from the OTA server. Hence, a demand on the performance of the OTA server and high data transfer speed will directly affect the client's use of OTA. In the case that there are a great number of users and the large data capacity to be processed, such technique cannot satisfy users' needs.